


care where it's needed

by hongmunmu



Category: One Piece
Genre: Adult trio, Character-focused, Drabble, Found Family, Gen, Hair, Mother-Son Relationship, No Dialogue, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:07:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24583558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hongmunmu/pseuds/hongmunmu
Summary: Robin tries to do what Usopp's mother couldn't, and thinks about her own.
Relationships: Brook & Nico Robin, Brook & Usopp (One Piece), Franky & Nico Robin, Nico Robin & Usopp
Comments: 14
Kudos: 151





	care where it's needed

**Author's Note:**

> robin and usopp's relationship is very underrated imo and i think it's really cute how they're the crew hairdressers and have adjacent gardens. robin is really patient with him and he always gets really emotional whenever robin makes a sacrifice/gesture for the strawhats or he feels like he's let her down so immediately i get carried away with self indulgent adoption hcs

Robin dreams about it often, the feeling of her mother running a brush through her hair. Sometimes she thinks she remembers it, in some fragmented memory, something her mind has fabricated over the years through wishful thinking until it’s indistinguishable from what really happened. Though Robin knows better than anyone that history is often just that. 

Usopp had known his mother, more than Robin had hers at any rate, but that experience also seems to be something he lacks; indeed, even though he joins Robin in maintaining the rest of the crew’s hair, and does a pretty good job too, she never sees him once touch his own. _My mom would just chop it all off when it got too big,_ he reminisces once, with a laugh that Robin doesn’t share. _I don’t think she really knew what to do with it otherwise._ He’d fidgeted with his bandanna, as if to illustrate his point. _She should have learned how to care for her child’s hair,_ Robin had said, not unkindly, and Usopp hadn’t really known what to reply to that, so he shrugs it off with a mumbled _she had a lot of other stuff to deal with,_ and changes the topic back to Robin; her hair reminds him of Banchina’s, he says. Robin lets it go and takes the compliment with a smile, but she does have a word with Brook later that night, when she leaves the girl’s dorm to take his watch. 

There are little things like this that Robin can do, wants to do, and when she does them she feels something stir in her own heart. She doesn’t tell anyone about it; Brook, credit be to him, doesn’t pry. He simply nods in silent understanding, and hums a tune that feels strangely familiar as he heads back inside, stopping just a moment to rest one skeletal hand on her shoulder. 

Robin had never thought much about being a mother. She’d seen the other children of Ohara dream of it, little girls cradling handmade dolls, making pretend like they were their own mothers, copying things they’d seen them do. Robin had never felt such an urge, though she supposes she’d never had the opportunity. Most of her childhood she’d spent dreaming about a mother of her own; of a wise and warm adult who would sit her on her lap, hold her close, brush her hair after a bath. That kind of thing.

She did remember one time, though, when she’d thought about it as a small escapist fantasy. Nothing concrete, never serious; Robin knew she had no opportunity to be a mother. She had no wish to bring a child into a world that had hurt her so much; into a world that did so much damage. And for a long time, she didn’t intend on living long enough to find out. But she recalls a time in Alabasta, when she had been a part of Baroque Works, when she had quietly and against Crocodile’s orders, helped a little girl escape another of that country’s episodes of violence. It had been a quick and impulse decision, with only a few words exchanged; but Robin had thought about that little girl for weeks afterwards. What had become of her, whether or not she'd survived. What might've been if Robin had gone with her. In those days Robin had become an expert of compartmentalising emotion, never sparing a second thought to the many loose ends of what she did. She had given up, after all, given up on everything. 

Or she thought she had. But in the time after that one small encounter where she saved a little girl from a burning town, she had thought of close to nothing else. Her dreams became clouded, hazy experiences that felt more like memories than anything else; she walked through fields of flowers, along desert paths and in ancient moss-covered ruins, holding a small hand in her own. A daughter. A son, perhaps. She’d only felt the hand, and somehow, it had spurred her to keep walking.

Of course, then Luffy had dropped in like a cyclone, and done the same thing, if in a less gentle way. But now he’s her captain, and she’d die for him gladly, but Robin knows that he isn’t the type to be led anywhere. If he ever falters, if he ever _should_ need it, she’ll be there without question, as will the rest of them. But somehow, she doubts he will. Luffy didn’t seem to be anyone’s child; didn’t crave it, the way everyone else did. He didn’t seem to distinguish much between any of his relationships, in fact; he was a binary sort. People and the bonds between them didn’t require much thought for him. To Luffy, people were simply friends, or they weren’t. And that was good enough for him.

Robin isn’t the same, and doesn’t aim to be, but she respects it just the same.

Robin’s mother was a secret that only she knew, something wrapped up tightly and buried somewhere deep inside her heart like a time capsule, like a barrel of wine, placed somewhere dark and dusty; well-maintained, checked on, but never opened. A little speck of sediment that hung somewhere damp and over time had crystallised, grown hard as a diamond and impenetrable to everyone, even to Robin. Olivia was something locked away by a little girl in a special and secret place, a child’s treasure that had been buried and then forgotten. Not even Robin knew that treasure any more. It belonged to the girl she had once been; her and only her. Robin merely safeguarded it, the lone keeper of that sacred knowledge; just as she did with so much else. The secret history of Ohara; the secret history of Robin. All tomes locked in a magnificent library that no one else would ever see.

Usopp couldn’t keep himself together like Robin could, didn’t know how to analyse his behaviour or compartmentalise those memories. It wasn’t as though he was tripping over himself trying to hide it; in fact, Robin doubts he even notices it. Luffy is the same, acting with honesty in his behaviour, but the difference is Luffy has nothing to hide. Conversely Usopp’s mother and father are written in everything he does, every overreaction, every blurted exclamation or unnecessary apology, clear as day; he doesn’t seem to know that, though. He seems to think of himself as similar to Luffy, unaffected, untethered; free from that baggage. Like a man carrying a sack of rice, unaware of a hole at the back leaving an endless trail behind him.

But then, Usopp wasn’t the anomaly. Luffy was more free than anyone; even from himself, from his past, from the complimentary weight that virtually every person on the earth had been given to carry, just by virtue of being born. Everyone had it, some more than others, some better-hidden, but everyone carried that weight. Sanji had it in his gentle unsullied hands, Nami in her soft eyes and open heart; Franky had built it into himself, with every scrap of metal, every nail he hammered into his body. Everyone else on the crew had it, had learned how to live with it, how to hide it. Usopp didn’t even seem to know it was there. Or perhaps he was lying even to himself. 

Robin supposes that if you are raised with a lie, told it over and again, growing with that lie as the single tenet of your identity, you have no choice but to believe it. If Usopp were to connect the dots between his parents and his personality issues, there’d be nothing left to solve. Nothing left to prove. Even his goal, his sole ambition, the thing that drove him into adulthood, was based on a promise that a child had made to a stubborn mother on her deathbed. 

Love was what had destroyed Usopp’s family, Robin supposed, though she doubted that destroyed is an adjective Usopp would take kindly to. But it was what she saw. A father whose first and only love was the sea; a mother who loved her husband so much that she could accept that. A son who loved both of his parents enough to accept those two irresponsible forms of love as truth, impervious to how much damage it had all done to him. A sniper could only focus on small parts of the whole, Robin supposes. Never the whole picture.

Robin finds it hard to imagine how love could destroy something. Her life had been an abscess of love, and whatever crumbs she had found, she clung to and treasured like pearls. But there was Usopp, riddled with insecurity and pessimism and fear that he didn’t know the source of, plain as day. But then, Robin guesses, the love that had done this to Usopp hadn’t been aimed at him. 

She supposes the alien of it is why she finds it so interesting. 

Perhaps she was wrong about it all, the psychoanalysing. Perhaps it was simply genetics, or perhaps Usopp had simply been that way from the start. But in her experience on this earth, people aren’t born hating themselves. Not a one. And that thought is what stops Robin, when she starts to avert her eyes, when she thinks that perhaps this is none of her business. She thinks of the little girl in Alabasta. 

Franky understands. Robin doesn’t much speak of her past to him, nor him to her, not even when they’re alone; but there is an unspoken shared knowledge between them, the type that she supposes only adults can really recognise. An acknowledgment of a kind. Theirs were old wounds, healed over; some incorrectly, perhaps, and scars left behind to show for it. But they were a part of the fabric that made them up. There was no more growing to be done, no more grief that could be felt, no more questions to ask; they had made their peace, healed as best they could, and achieved a kind of wholeness again. That was the knowledge they shared; that they both had wounds, and those wounds did not need reopening. Just maintenance, and to be seen. _I see that you have suffered; I see that you have done all there is to do. I see that you have lived your life independent of me, shaped yourself into the person you are, and you are happy with it. You are not complete; but you are content. I see these things, and I understand._

Franky understands what Robin feels about Usopp, too, though it’s less easy to describe. It isn’t pity, nor grief, and it isn’t the acknowledgement that they share between themselves and Brook. Usopp’s wounds are not old scars yet. They’re not new wounds, either. They hover in a stage where some damage is done; further damage can continue, or be lessened. Robin hopes to try and encourage the latter, where she can. She sees that in Franky, too. He looks at Usopp in a way that says something similar, though she also gets the sense he has his own reasons for caring. 

She supposes what they feel is responsibility. Or rather, an opportunity to be responsible, in the way that his parents weren’t. A way to stop him going down the road they themselves had been down. 

Not to say Robin thought she could undo any of it, or planned to replace it; her nature was what she would describe as an active, but not an interfering one. Usopp wasn’t a child in need of saving, and Franky and Robin were not his parents. But both of them were aware that Usopp needed patience; a stubborn mother had raised a stubborn son, and an absent father taught nothing. And however much the world had hurt Robin and Franky, however much pain they’d endured and inflicted in turn, whatever dark and hopeless people they’d become in the lives they’d had before, Robin likes to think neither of them are so damaged as to ignore something that simple. 

So Franky is present, and proactive. He protects Usopp; he teaches him to build. Robin is patient. She explains decisions he doesn’t immediately understand the reasoning of; she doesn’t let him build walls around his feelings. She offers fluidity where Banchina had been unyielding; Franky offers stability where Yasopp had been imaginary. 

And Brook, well, he covers the base that Robin thought best left to him. Some days after she spoke to Brook about giving Usopp hair tips, she notices they’re both nowhere to be seen above deck, nor in the galley or dorms; she wanders around the ship idly, as she returns an empty coffee cup to the kitchen, and hears laughter coming from one of the bathrooms. Silently, she leans back against the wall just for a few moments, and listens. The sound of running water, Usopp giggling with a kind of excited embarrassment, Brook humming some merry tune. Usopp exclaiming something which Robin doesn’t quite make out, and doesn’t particularly care to. She’s not interested in prying. 

She’s gone by the time they come out, relaxing above deck with the rest of the crew, but she pays attention, still. No one else seems to notice in the weeks that follow how Usopp’s hair steadily looks longer and healthier, or how he slowly stops wearing head-coverings so frequently, or how he joins Brook in the evenings before bed while he does his nightly hair-maintenance routines. But Robin notices, and smiles to herself when she sees it. It might not make a huge difference, or offer any significant change in the long run, but she’s still happy she did it. Just a small, good thing. 

The next time the crew have their hair cut, and Robin and Usopp stay behind once the others have left to take care of their own, she notices Usopp using some new products, and a comb that Brook had given him, a confidence in his movements that hadn’t been there before. She makes no comment on it; she just tells him it looks good. And for what seems like the first time in their makeshift hair salon, he gives her a big grin, and says _thanks._ Robin just smiles, and makes a final trim to her fringe. It feels like a closing remark, somehow, the snip of the scissors. _And that’s that._


End file.
